Anvers Place in the suburb of Hoon Hay, Christchurch

Anvers Place in Hoon Hay – Named after the Siege of Anvers, a battle in 1914 during the 1st World War. Named because it runs off Mathers Road and is near Fusilier Place. First appears in street directories in 1950. A small amount of information from the library website and there are mistakes in the information. The street doesn’t run off Mathers Rd as it runs off Tankerville Rd. The street also existed before Fusilier Place. The street isn’t on Christchurch map of 1941 but it is on maps from 1950 onwards. There were house for sale in the 1950s. In 1953 there was mention of a recreational reserve and in maps until 1962 the area was surrounded by land and there wasn’t any housing.

Edited to add that I will need to check council records for the naming of this street as it is possible that it wasn’t named after the siege of Anvers but named after Eric and Muriel D’anvers who lived at 34 Tankerville Rd which is exactly where Anvers Place was developed.

Most the houses were built in the 1940s with a few from later decades. There is an extremely rundown property from 1910 and I suspect that this house would originally have had an address on Tankerville Rd and Anvers Place developed on this property. This house is overrun with junk and going by google maps it has been like this for several years. I found a siege of Anvers from the year 1792 and it took a while to figure out a siege of Anvers for 1914. The 1914 siege of Anvers is also called the siege of Antwerp. At 16 Anvers Place there is a nursing home called Hoon Hay House and it looks like it is mostly for dementia care. There was an article in the Press in 2017 and there were complaints about the behaviour of mentally ill people who lived at Hoon Hay House. It is possible that the status of Hoon Hay House has changed from social housing to residential care. At first I thought that this home was where the Hoon Hay Club used to be but searching Papers Past I found that there was a furniture factory on this site. I don’t know when the furniture factory closed and the rest home took over the site. I used to live in Hoon Hay and I just can’t remember the factory. Apart from the run down house nothing really stood out for me but did like the tree hut in a property.